HOW AND WHY TO DO THE SEO COMPETITION ANALYSIS?

Competitive analysis is a major component of strategic analysis whether it is commercial, marketing or

natural referencing (SEO). It allows a company to measure the opportunities in a market while
identifying its main competitors. SEO agencies generally carry out their competition studies on three
different levels during the audit stage of […]

What is SEO competitive analysis?

The audit of your competitive universe consists very simply of analyzing the SEO strategy implemented
by your various competitors. This makes it possible to identify "good practices" and anticipate the
natural referencing optimizations that must be carried out on a website in order to be visible. As the
competitive environment is in perpetual motion, this analysis should be carried out at different times in
the lifespan of a website such as the launch of a new website, during a redesign or migration, etc.

Why do an SEO competition analysis?

Analyzing your competitive world allows you to realize the task at hand. Indeed, the analysis of the
competitors present on the first page of search engine results makes it possible to determine the level
of competitiveness of the market as well as the efforts made by its adversaries. In addition, when
working on your natural referencing, it is imperative to frame and prioritize the various actions to be
carried out in order to best optimize your budget according to the objectives set.

Generally focused on three pillars, the SEO strategy will consist of working:

technical SEO;

contents ;

popularity and notoriety.

The analysis of the competitive environment therefore makes it possible to identify the key factors
involved in the success of the various SEO strategies implemented by its competitors. The objective is to
be inspired by it to develop its own strategy and thus increase its traffic from natural results.

Competitive analysis has 4 stages:

identification of its direct and indirect competitors;

performing an SEO positioning audit of its competitors;

careful study of strategic choices, SEO optimizations and content developed by its competitors;

study of the popularity and the netlinking strategies deployed.

How to Perform a SEO Competition Analysis in 4 Steps?

1) Identify your competitors

The first step does not necessarily require calling on the expertise of an SEO agency. The first step is to
identify the main competitors present in the top 10 results of search engines on your main competitive
queries. In order to establish a short list of words that are most suited to your market and the most
sought after on Google, it is possible to use a free tool made available by Google:keyword planning tool.
This tool is not available if you have not launched paid keyword campaigns, it is then possible to turn to
free tools such as the free version of Neil Patel's tool:Ubersuggest.

Using an SEO tool specializing in competitive analysis and position tracking like SEMRush will greatly
simplify the task and make it possible to identify direct and indirect competitors in just a few clicks
without having to type each keyword in the search engine.

2) Perform a positioning audit of competitors

To carry out the following three audits, it is recommended to rely on the tools and skills of an SEO
agency. The firstSEO auditcarried out consists in measuring the quantity and the quality of the
positioning of the various competitors identified beforehand.

Before embarking on analysis, keyword research and checking the positions of its competitors, it is
possible to assess the indexing status of its competitors in the Google search engine thanks to the use of
the "site: domainname.com" command. There is no correlation between the number of indexed pages
and the number of keywords positioned, but the number of indexed pages generally gives a good
estimate of the volume of a site and therefore a good estimate of its capacity to position themselves
potentially on requests.

There are different tools to do this job. SEMRush, SEObserver, Yooda Insight are the most commonly
used tools. For each competitor, it will be a question of analyzing which keywords are best targeted by
the domain , the search volume of each of them and to which category they belong (priority, generic,
long tail, etc.) . Indeed, some competitors will position themselves better on generic transactional
keywords , others on brand or “brand” keywords, on long tail keywords or even on informational
keywords .

This audit will make it possible to establish a complete inventory of the keywords in the market and thus
establish a priority list of keywords to target for your domain.

3) Study the on-page optimization and the content strategy of its competitors

ANALYSIS OF ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATIONS CARRIED OUT BY COMPETITORS

Once the keywords have been carefully selected, it will be necessary to define a tree structure that
responds both to the user but also to the search engine robots (crawlers). To this end, the construction
of the tree structure will be carried out taking into account:

the different practices of competitors;

the different keywords you want to target;

the logical and thematic grouping of the different key pages of a website, also called semantic cocoon or
silos.

The competitive analysis will also make it possible to establish a list of good practices implemented by
the various sites occupying the first places in the search results. Different SEO elements can be analyzed
depending on the positioning strategy that we want to put in place. As an example, here is a
non-exhaustive list:

journey and user experience on various strategic pages;

the titles tags strategic pages;

optimization of meta tags description;

the titles of the pages (h1) targeting strategic keywords;

optimization of the semantic structure of pages (hn structure);

the establishment of a internal mesh coherent and thematic as well as a breadcrumb trail;

construction of URLs;

etablishing of structured data;

optimization of faceted navigation for e-commerce sites;

massive use of redirects, correction of 404 error pages;

optimization of loading time;

multilingual strategy;

etc.

In order to carry out this analysis work, it will be necessary to use a crawl analysis tool such as OnCrawl,
Hextrakt or even the very complete Screaming Frog.

ANALYSIS OF THE OPTIMIZATIONS CARRIED OUT BY THE COMPETITORS ON THE VARIOUS CONTENTS OF
THE SITE

The different content of each SEO competitor should be analyzed in order to determine the level of
maturity of the SEO strategy. content marketingdeveloped by them, as well as work to be done to hope
to position ourselves on the requests that we want to target. As an example, here are various points to
analyze on the different content pages of competing sites (category / subcategory pages, specific
landing pages, blog content, etc.), this list is obviously not exhaustive:

the average length of the content produced;

optimization of the content structure and optimization of the SEO experience;

analysis semantics content;

responses to user questions;

image optimization (information on Alt tags);

internal links;

frequency of publication;

indexing and positioning of strategic content;

organization of blog content (categorization);

duplicate content;

etc.

This competitive analysis will also make it possible to identify new content ideas in order to complement
an already launched content strategy. The objective being to best meet Google's three EAT criteria
(Expertise, Authoritativeness, Thrustworthiness) which in French mean:

Expertise, authority and reliability.

4) Analyze inbound links and domain authority of competitors

The last competitive analysis to be carried out concerns the popularity of the various competing sites.
This involves measuring the quantity (number of links) and the quality (theming) of the external links
received (netlinking) by the different pages of the sites positioning themselves on generic requests. This
will make it possible to realize the investment to be made to compete with the sites on the first page.
The most common analysis tools used to carry out this analysis are Majestic SEO, SEO Observer, Ahref or
even Link Explorer from Moz. It is interesting to combine the data provided by these different tools for a
more detailed analysis. In addition, this netlinking data can be combined with positioning data in order
to be as precise as possible.

All of these elements make it possible to make decisions for improve your natural referencing: on which
themes am I likely to position myself, should I set up a netlinking strategy? etc.

The entire SEARCH-Factory SEO team is at your disposal to discuss your expectations in terms of natural
referencing and especially your questions relating to the analysis of your SEO competitors.

Written by Benjamin G.